“If Republicans are going to take back the U.S. Senate, it
doesn’t look as if New York will be much help,” Maurice Carroll,
director of the Hamden, Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University
Polling Institute, said in a statement.

New York voters have an unusual opportunity to vote in two
Senate races on Nov. 2. Gillibrand, 43, was appointed in January
2009 to fill the seat vacated when President Barack Obama picked
Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Gillibrand is running to
fill the remaining two years of Clinton’s original term. Schumer
is seeking re-election to a full six-year term.

Gillibrand, who moved to the Senate from the U.S. House of
Representatives, has a 55-34 percent lead, picking up support
from a 48-42 percent advantage in a Sept 23 survey by the
university. She is favored 59-28 percent among women, and leads
51-39 percent among men.

In races for state office, the poll showed Democratic state
Senator Eric Schneiderman with a 43-32 percent lead over Staten
Island’s Republican District Attorney Dan Donovan in the contest
for attorney general. Incumbent Democratic state Comptroller
Thomas DiNapoli has a 49-31 percent lead over Republican Harry Wilson.

Governor’s Race

Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic state attorney general who is
running for governor, holds a 55-37 percent lead over Tea Party-
backed Republican Carl Paladino, who’s vowed to clean up the
state capitol of Albany “with a baseball bat,” a Quinnipiac
poll released yesterday showed.

In today’s poll, 30 percent of voters describe themselves
as angry with the way the federal government works, and an
additional 43 percent say they are dissatisfied. In the Senate
race, DioGuardi leads among the angry voters 59-29 percent.

Sixty-five percent of voters say they don’t know enough
about Schumer’s opponent, Townsend, a market research executive,
to form an opinion.

Little Recognition

Candidates for state office aren’t widely recognized, the
poll showed. In the attorney general’s race, 75 percent of
voters say they don’t know enough about Schneiderman to form an
opinion, and 85 percent don’t know enough about Donovan.

In the comptroller’s race, 90 percent of voters don’t know
enough about Wilson to form an opinion, and 65 percent don’t
know enough about DiNapoli.

“You have to wonder if anybody is paying attention,”
Carroll said.

“There seems to be about a one-third generic Republican
vote” in New York, Carroll said. “All the Republican
candidates for New York statewide office are within a couple of
points of it.”

Quinnipiac University surveyed 1,141 likely voters in New
York State from Oct. 1 to Oct. 5. The poll has a margin of error
of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.